Rebuilding Revisited

I think Matt Fenwick is absolutely right with his musings about where the Flames should go from this year’s disaster. I think he also presents lessons for fans of the Ottawa Senators:

Look, a guy can advocate change as a way of moving forward. I’m not saying Status Quo or Bust. I think trading Kipper, if possible, is a great idea, and it wouldn’t take much to get the fans on board. I’m warming to the idea of trading Regehr, mainly because I think the Flames can fill in the D more easily than the forward ranks. But “blow it all to smithereens” or the like makes no sense, and it’s too easy, and the payoff might not be there.

It doesn’t make any sense to me either. First, I don’t think people realize how much pain fans of the Penguins and Black Hawks went through before they exploded into champions.

Second, the pain guarantees nothing. (If the Pens hadn’t won the Crosby lottery…) More often than not, the team sucks for a long time, they draft some good players but still eventually only improve to mediocre. (The St. Louis Blues decided to “blow it up” in 2005. Its six seasons later. How many people see St. Louis contending for a Cup any time soon? Will this core ever be good enough?)

Third, dumping expensive veterans provides very little real return. Getting a future star in a trade has become a pipe dream.

As Matt notes, this doesn’t mean that the status quo is acceptable. If Feaster (or Murray) can make a trade that makes the team better by returning either cap space or useful assets, go for it. But to simply make the team worse for the sake of getting worse?

Comments

I don’t think all fans require instant gratification all the time. If we truely believed finishing last this year would increase our Stanley Cup odds in 3 years some fans would accept that.

True Toronto and St. Louis have been bad for a long time but what about Tampa Bay? They were so bad that they were rewarded with Hedman and Stamkos and they’ve moved up the standings for having done so.

If we truely believed finishing last this year would increase our Stanley Cup odds in 3 years some fans would accept that.

They may not finish last, there probably is not a Stamkos in the draft, and even if they did draft a Stamkos, the odds of winning a Cup in three years would improve only very marginally. (Perhaps from none to very slim?) I agree that some fans – perhaps most – would go along simply because they have lost faith in this group.